Designing for wellbeing

The creative process focused approach
The two other examples we will look at are from the Family 7 project executed
in collaboration with the City of Espoo’s child protection unit and various
social work representatives in Espoo. The teaching focused on helping the
students to understand and consciously develop their personal creative
processes. This approach therefore focuses more on the artistic side of the
design process. It builds on an openness to allow any given input to change
the route of the process, and the design student is expected to maintain an
open attitude towards the phenomenon being investigated and to explore
it from multiple perspectives in order to be receptive to stimuli. As the creative
process is executed in a design context, the results display a desire to
change things for the better, as the central purpose of design is to support
and enable a better quality of life. In this exercise the students’ frames of
reflection are firstly personal ideals, secondly peer group discussion and
support, and thirdly set by the media one works with. As already discussed,
this can yield positive contributions to disciplines that, on the face of it,
are far removed from design.
The emphasis on personal creative processes encourages the students’
involvement in and engagement with their projects and the individuals
they meet. This encourages the projection of their own ideals about quality
of life onto their work, and provides a very different perspective from
the user-centred approach, which relies on set frames against which data
can be reflected and conclusions made. In turn, the creative challenge is
a setting for encouraging responsibility from designers – they cannot hide
behind the paradigm. Concrete, material results are emphasised, implying
that the students cannot hide behind a vague conceptual design proposal,
but rather have to face up to the evaluation of a materialised idea. Transforming
a conceptualised phenomenon into a material output renders the
implications of the proposal visible and assessable.
7 Design Experimentation and Exploration taught by professor Maarit Mäkelä and lecturer
Simo Puintila, and supported by researchers from Aalto University
48 · We have always been here before: on design courting real disciplines